This residency explores the potential of King's Immersive Audio Technology developed by Professor Zoran Cvetkovic with Dr Enzo De Sena to create sound art installation(s) engaging with the theme of ‘Intelligence’. The team are particularly interested in the forms of intelligence and awareness that exist outside of our immediate subjective perception. In addition to original sound piece(s), the intention is to create a codex of possibilities that King’s Immersive Audio Technology offers, and a notational system for implementing these.
‘Perceptual Negativity’ is a concept through which the team hope to engage with the human processes of intelligence, looking at this through a methodological approach involving sound art, spatiality, theatre and fine art. The project is particularly interested in the way the technology allows for artists to control subtle, nuanced changes in position, depth and distance of sound, and how this might fuel the creative process.
Zoran Cvetkovic is Professor of Signal Processing in Department of Engineering. His research is in the domain of signal processing, including signal processing theory and applications, predominantly in audio technologies and neuroscience. He has led the development of two novel immersive sound technologies that will be used in this project.
Enzo De Sena is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Surrey. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a former Marie Curie Fellow. His current research interests include immersive audio, room acoustics modelling, beamforming and binaural modelling. For more information, see www.desena.org.
Catherine Kontz is a composer, director and artist whose work specialises in exploring new approaches to music and theatre with a focus on new notational strategies, nonlinear logics, the use and perception of space, movement and theatricality and the reciprocal relationships that can be negotiated between these practices.
Blog written by the project team
July 2021
Weather Systems is a series of exercises in sound treatment using King’s Audio Technology to transform sound unrelated to weather environments into soundscapes we perceive as a weather system i.e. a storm, rain, wind etc… These short exercises give me the chance to explore this spatial sound technology further and get a better idea of its potential within my work.
For the first exercise I aimed to create “a storm in a teacup” using sampled sound from making tea - a china teacup, a metal spoon, a teabag and hot water. Using the binaural setting of King’s Audio Technology, I positioned the selected samples in a very large, virtual space in different locations around that space, and decided on a direction/trajectory for them to move in that space over the course of 90 seconds. While doing this, I gradually increased the reflectiveness over that time too. The result is a little track that goes from tea- to rain-making, if you use a little imagination.
The next exercise will involve cat and dog sounds. Will it be raining cats and dogs? It remains to be seen!